this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Ok ok ok. After a disastrous start to the day things have progressed a bit. Actually got a tiny bit of gardening done after neglecting the balcony for months . tidied up the dead stuff, improved the staking on the manzano chilli, shuffled pots around - including the very sickly and cold curry big mama leaf plant to a more sheltered spot (it was getting depressing to look at. And it'll come back in spring.).
I won't even be at home for most of the next month but I went ahead and sowed some coriander and garlic chives, and have soaked some snow pea and sweet pea seeds to sow tomorrow, because what the hey. They'll look after themselves, kind of. Everything's had a very thorough water + feed if needed, and I'm amazed at how relatively well that manzano is doing despite all the neglect. Truly a cool climate chillo, definitely a good choice for Melbourne. (e: yes it's related to rocoto).
All that and a whole lot of staring into space have improved things as well as cleaning the kitchen and having a long overdue shower with hair/scalp cleanse. The sun has made a big difference too. Body has calmed the fuck down and is healing itself.
Neck still hurts but I'll call off my trip to the 'rat tomorrow and take it easy, hopefully I'll be right as rain by Monday. I have work to catch up on but today is for total relaxation
I’m so impressed with you guys and your chillis. Chilli and capsicum are one of those plants that I’m just not good at caring for.
I got a bit of time out in the garden too! Mostly I just weeded and swept up a big chunk of the leaves that the maple and the ornamental pears dropped - this place has 3 pear trees and 2 maples. I initially tried to keep on top of cleaning up the leaves as they dropped but I was fighting a losing battle, so I just left them and waited until they’d dropped all their leaves. We’re getting on 4 fortnight’s worth of green bins filled, with probably 1 more to go.
But check out my broccolis and my cabbage 😍
spoiler
Try growing rocoto chillis. They’re pretty well-suited to the Melbourne climate, produce lots of fruit, and keep bearing for years.
I can't believe I didn't start growing them earlier. Another cold-tolerant seemingly tropical edible plant a friend of mine is successfully growing from cuttings is babaco. I can't wait until it fruits but it might need a couple more years
I'm the total opposite! Chillies come relatively easy to me (OK, I confess I have poor luck with capsicums). But HOW GOOD ARE YOUR BRASSICAS?!?!?! Please tell me your secrets! How do you get them looking so lush without being ravaged by caterpillars and/or possums? I've only grown cabbages once - on an extremely fertile shared plot where you'd be hard pressed to kill anything (and they were still a few caterpillars), and I only successfully grew broccoli once at my old place but it needed to be de-caterpillared damn near every morning. And then when the broccoli got just large enough to harvest they were poleaxed overnight 😭
Absolutely love love love your veggie patch and I see you've got a nice crop of broad beans coming up too
Thank youuuuu!!
Possums, thankfully (and touch wood) aren’t a problem here. There is some kind of animal that started having a munch on my plants, but I’ve worked out that if there are sweet peas, that it beelines for that and leaves everything else alone, so I have a small part of my flowerbed stocked with sacrificial sweet peas haha. It works so far. Slugs are a problem though, way more than caterpillars. Every morning I go and inspect it with my cuppa and wipe the underside of the leaves. There’s almost always little caterpillar eggs on them, so I nip them in the bud before they can become an issue. There’s not much I can do about the slugs and snails though. I put the gel barrier down and keep it mulched because they apparently don’t like crossing mulch, but if I go out there at night I can almost always pick two or three out of the bed. The broccoli heads are starting to get big enough now that I’ll start protecting them at night: you just have to wrap a bit of foil over the top at night and take it off in the morning. It stops anything from getting to the actual broccoli.
I do have broad beans too! And sugar snap peas. I don’t have much luck with beans and peas either. I never get more than a handful of sugar snap peas, even though the plant itself is really healthy. It’s my first time growing broad beans and I head they were easy. They’re going really well and again, the plant is really healthy, heaps of flowers, but no actual beans, so idk 🤷♀️
O wise one of the brassicaceae, I am deeply grateful for the sharing of your sacred knowledge! 🙇 No seriously I just figured it was utterly not worth the time to grow brassicas unless you had an enclosure. I am just gobsmacked at how well you've picked the caterpillar eggs off the leaves every time - and with so many plants. I used to do it with my morning cuppa too at my old house, but either I attract mutant caterpillars or I'm just not very thorough because my broccoli leaves were far less intact than yours. (and at least 30% of what I planted didn't make it to the flowering stage)
But the foil! I had no idea about the foil. I will definitely give that a go whenever I next try growing broccoli or cauliflower. Thank you for sharing that tip, I can't believe I'd never heard of it before.
I tend to have better luck with snow peas than sugar snap. And with certain varieties over others. There's this dwarf snow pea I grow in pots on the balcony and when it's late winter to early summer and the specific spot I plant it gets full but not overly intense sun, I get heaps of peas. I confess though I've never made anything with them because I've eaten every single one raw off the vine, they're so good 😻
Broad beans in my experience are easy, in that they're not as prone to pests and diseases, and as long as they're growing close enough to each other that you can sort of tie them in a bundle with a stake or fence for support, (and even then they'll still bear fruit if they're flopping about) they're pretty much set and forget. But they can take their time. I had given up on mine at my old place: sown in early autumn, they were growing directly in the ground in painstakingly cultivated yet still very clayey soil where nothing would germinate - just kept slowly growing for months with great leaves and eventually flowers but no apparent beans, so I kind of forgot about them until I was cleaning out the garden in October preparing to leave... and holy shit when I went to cut them down I was just drowning in pods that were all growing on the inside of the patch! I ended up taking my whole harvest to a friend's place and we just shelled them for 2 hours. We ended up with like 1 solid kilo of fresh, depodded beans. It was very satisfying.
That chillo is doing extremely well jeez! I'd never really heard of them. Looks like they pack a bit of punch too.
E. ohh rocoto
Yeah apparently there's some slight difference between rocoto and manzano (variability of spiciness? Rocoto grows further south?) But both are Capsicum pubescens (heh I said pubes). this one said manzano on the label which also rates it a 4/10 for spiciness, but I haven't tried any yet so we'll find out soon I guess.
Rocoto grows to 2 metres and has yellow fruit, manzano grows to 1 metre and has red fruit. Both have lovely purple flowers and big black seeds. I think the rocoto is hotter. They are both good to grow.
Ooh then I'm pretty sure mine is Manzano. Doesn't seem as tall as my friend's plants that they've said are Rocoto. I have a scotch bonnet and a medium sized Thai chilli that are both very hot so I actually hope this will be mild and sweet